Class 2: Digital Generation

We already talked a little bit about how technologies are integrated into teaching and learning. Now let's look at what does technology integration look like Harrison County High School in Gulfport, Mississippi. This is a wonderful example of students and teachers using technology tools for learning. If that’s not enough, see how Mary Scroggs Elementary School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina integrates technology to help younger children learn.

What knowledge do you currently have about teaching and learning? About what technology integration looks like in a classroom? What technology skills do you already possess?

How would you describe your future students? What type of learners will they be? What expectations will they have for their learning environment, for their teachers, for their community?

These are all questions to consider your audience, what teaching will need to look like for them, and how you can use technology in effective ways for this particular audience.

In order to find and document these appropriate uses of technology, you will work independently, in partners, and in groups to prepare educational activities for specific curriculum topics. As I mentioned on Monday, you will play the role of a classroom teacher and use your content knowledge, understanding of teaching and learning strategies, and your technology skills to develop real applications for the various tools explored during the semester. Your final product will be a web-based set of activities to teach specific curriculum objectives.

USB Key Drive VS. Gmail
As I talked on Monday, you have two choices to backup your projects of this semester. You can either choose to use a traditional USB key drive or choose to use the Gmail to backup your files and projects. Both ways have their pros and cons.

The Gmail is free and accessible anywhere with Internet access. You don't have to worry about lost or crash of your key drive, and it has the strong searching function. When you have a single file over 30M, however, it will be very hard to attach it to the email. Fortunately, most of our projects are no bigger than 2M except for your CD version of the iMovie project. But you can always save your iMovie project as the web version or even email version.

Using USB key drive, you usually do not have trouble with saving a single big file which is over 30M. But it may be lost or crashed, and some computers may not be able to recognize certain types of key drives.
We will talk about the use of Gmail account on Friday. If you choose to use key drive, the handout tells you how to set it up. Before you leave today you should have 2 folders and 1 document on your drive.

Two folders:

• Assignments
• Portfolio
  

Open if found document
Open MS Word and create a new document. Type the following:
1. your name
2. phone #
3. e-mail address

Save the file to your key drive (see handout). The file should be called "openiffound.doc". This file should be saved to the key drive - not in one of the 2 folders you created.

For Friday's class, we are going to introduce a little more about Windows and Mac, and our first assignment.

Reminder:
Tomorrow will be the last day for drop and add!

For Friday, we are going to :

• Play a BINGO game to get us know each other;
• Talk about our first assignment